Micks Distractions

My panoram­ics, although giv­ing a good field of view, didn’t really cut it for secu­rity. I needed a decent web­cam that I could shift around. For­tu­nately, I man­aged to obtain a Quick­Cam Orbit. This gives me full pan/tilt con­trol, and there is a Linux dri­ver too boot!

My WiFi lap­top now runs the Quick­Cam Orbit. The rea­son for this was to avoid dis­turb­ing the exist­ing panoramic cam­era setup. My dad man­aged to get a spher­i­cal dome for me to house the cam­era in. He also made a small box for it, to be bolted to the side of the tree. Pic­cies below.

I am run­ning motion detec­tion soft­ware on the cam­era. I have also writ­ten a small perl script to pro­vide web con­trol of pan/tilt, and set hot spots, (pre­de­fined posi­tions). A cron­job will kick off at night and cycle around the var­i­ous posi­tions giv­ing me an update. Also, if any­one enters the site, I will get an SMS to my mobile.

This setup was all pretty much a no-brainer. It took me an hour to write the perl script, build the motion soft­ware, and set it all up to SMS me when there was any motion. It took a cou­ple of days to fine tune it, (get­ting 20–30 SMS mes­sages because of a bloody pos­sum at 0200 is no fun).

Con­struc­tion piccies.

Click on the images for a big­ger view.




The cam­era dome with the lid closed.

You’re prob­a­bly won­der­ing what those sticks are for? Well, gaff tape runs over those sticks and around the body of the cam­era. Good ‘ol gaff. What would we do with­out it? Also, note the ‘cam­era holder’ which is just a small sar­dine tin. My dad went into Coles with a tape mea­sure look­ing for a tin just the right size.

The back view. A bit of angle bracket screws into a bit of wood which attaches to the tree.

Wide shot of the cam­era box up the tree. This was good tim­ing as the frame had just arrived.

Closeup of the cam­era bolted to the tree. Not so dis­crete any­more, every­one notices it. Oh well. It may act as a deter­rent.

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